AWS Mechanical Turk

Distributed Human Labor

EC2 Instances

Amazon AWS "in plain English"

There are tutorials, but they're kind of tough.

A server issue in Virginia is affecting most of the northeast, disrupting the infrastructure for many popular products and services including Netflix, Product Hunt, Medium, SocialFlow, Buffer, GroupMe, Pocket, Viber Amazon Echo and more.

It’s certainly not the first time AWS has taken much of the Internet out with it. In 2013, AWS suffered a similar outage that took services like Instagram, Airbnb and Vine offline. According to Buzzfeed, that’s a loss of about $1,100 per second for Amazon.

An alternative to Hadoop, Spark with Python

Essentially, the actual work in Big Data is still hard.

Most Hadoop users complain bitterly about the ops and time delays on their work.

Recent tools like Spark, Impala, etc. look better, but ops (setup, management of the systems) is a giant pain.

Just "moving data around" takes a long time and some serious engineering expertise. (E.g., "The time required to move the data from Amazon S3 to HDFS was about 1 hour and 45 minutes." -- 1 billion reddit comments)

Critical Discussion

Big Data and whole data are not the same.Without taking into account the sample of a data set, the size of the data set is meaningless. For example, a researcher may seek to understand the topical frequency of tweets, yet if Twitter removes all tweets that contain problematic words or content – such as references to pornography or spam – from the stream, the topical frequency would be inaccurate. Regardless of the number of tweets, it is not a representative sample as the data is skewed from the beginning.

... four quantitatively adept social scientists reported that Google’s flu-tracking service not only wildly overestimated the number of flu cases in the United States in the 2012-13 flu season — a well-known miss — but has also consistently overshot in the last few years. Google Flu Trends’ estimate for the 2011-12 flu season was more than 50 percent higher than the cases reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. ...Their technical criticism of Google Flu Trends is that it is not using a broader array of data analysis tools. Indeed, their analysis shows that combining Google Flu Trends with C.D.C. data, and applying a few tweaking techniques, works best.

"The Anxieties of Big Data": Surveillance and the Surveilled

And while there is an enormous structural power asymmetry between the surveillers and surveilled, neither are those with the greatest power free from being haunted by a very particular kind of data anxiety: that no matter how much data they have, it is always incomplete, and the sheer volume can overwhelm the critical signals in a fog of possible correlations.

"Squeaky Dolphin" and GCHQ's anxiety

What is Data Science?

(and how is it related?)

"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data"

by Halevy, Norvig, Pereira at Google in 2009

The first lesson of Web-scale learning is to use available large-scale data rather than hoping for annotated data that isn’t available. For instance, we find that useful semantic relationships can be automatically learned from the statistics of search queries and the corresponding results-- or from the accumulated evidence of Web-based text patterns and formatted tables-- in both cases without needing any manually annotated data.

Some good, recent articles about data science jobs

Type A: Analysis

This type is primarily concerned with making sense of data or working with it in a fairly static way. The Type A Data Scientist is very similar to a statistician (and may be one) but knows all the practical details of working with data that aren’t taught in the statistics curriculum: data cleaning, methods for dealing with very large data sets, visualization, deep knowledge of a particular domain, writing well about data, and so on.

Type B: Builders

Type B Data Scientists share some statistical background with Type A, but they are also very strong coders and may be trained software engineers. The Type B Data Scientist is mainly interested in using data “in production.” They build models which interact with users, often serving recommendations (products, people you may know, ads, movies, search results).

"Metadata"

President Obama has emphasized that the NSA is “not looking at content.” “[T]his is just metadata,” Senator Feinstein told reporters.

We were wrong. We found that phone metadata is unambiguously sensitive, even in a small population and over a short time window. We were able to infer medical conditions, firearm ownership, and more, using solely phone metadata.

Uber Affairs,

4Square Checkins, Your secrets aren't safe.

Uber had just told all its users that if they were having an affair, it knew about it. Rides to Planned Parenthood? Regular rides to a cancer hospital? Interviews at a rival company? Uber knows about them, too.

Data Journalism is struggling, but game...

Applicants should have evidence of distinction in research and teaching in humanities computing and large-scale quantitative or big data analysis of cultural archives. Applicants should have expertise in algorithmic development, data culture, data mining, and quantitative analysis of visual or textual materials. Specific domain application could be in any number of areas, from historical text archives to game databases. Applicants should be able to teach courses on topics related to humanities computing and big data for one or more of the following departments: English, Science and Technology Studies, Cinema and Digital Media.